Mainstream processor chips, both in high performance and low power segments, are increasingly integrating additional functionality such as graphics, display engines, security engines, PCIe™ ports (i.e., ports in accordance with the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI Express™ (PCIe™)) Specification Base Specification version 2.0 (published 2007) (hereafter the PCIe™ specification) and other PCIe™ based peripheral devices, while maintaining legacy support for devices compliant with a PCI specification such as the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Local Bus Specification, version 3.0 (published 2002) (hereafter the PCI specification).
Such designs are highly segmented due to varying requirements from the server, desktop, mobile, embedded, ultra-mobile and mobile Internet device segments. Different markets seek to use single chip system-on-chip (SoC) solutions that combine at least some of processor cores, memory controllers, input/output controllers and other segment specific acceleration elements onto a single chip. However, designs that accumulate these features are slow to emerge due to the difficulty of integrating different intellectual property (IP) blocks on a single die. This is especially so, as IP blocks can have various requirements and design uniqueness, and can require many specialized wires, communication protocols and so forth to enable their incorporation into an SoC. As a result, each SoC or other advanced semiconductor device that is developed requires a great amount of design complexity and customization to incorporate different IP blocks into a single device.
One reason for this complexity is arbitration among multiple requests, as typically an IP block issues a request to an arbiter by asserting a request signal and holding it asserted until granted. This method of arbitration cannot be easily applied to multiple IP blocks on a single semiconductor die, due to location variations of the agents, causing routing and bandwidth challenges. In addition, ordering rules of certain protocols can cause significant latency in issuance, and thus, granting of requests.